I would think that $1000 is a poor choice for a legal remedy should anyone unjustifiably adversely affect my credit score. I would much rather have the court compel the defendant to remove the offensive negative marks on my credit report. It seems a more fitting remedy, and it's worth more to me in the long run.
I also cannot imagine what kind of criminal offense it would be to auto-renew a subscription. All of this reeks of future civil actions, and hopefully class actions, but is it illegal? I'm unsure. Good thing I'm a sysadmin and not a prosecutor. How is what Wired is doing illegal?
I cannot even begin to tell you all how many countless hours I spent reading f2k. I'd often laugh so hard that my eyes would start tearing up and my sides would ache.
I remember seeing a network TV magazine show (20/20 or Hard Copy or whatever those interchangeable network TV magazine shows are) about a guy who was told by his doctor to stop watching Seinfeld because this guy would laugh so hard it was messing him up. Hmmmm, I think I may have chuckled at Seinfeld a couple of times. I think I found f2k as hilarious as this guy must've found Seinfeld.
The ultimate for me was definately "What is a Finite State Machine?" It's in the hall of fame...it should be required reading for every programmer.
Oh yeah...that's true. If that spamware she was using would sort out the victim list by mail exchanger and address as few as five to ten victim's e-mail boxes per envelope, those numbers would be achievable. Even on a 56k (33.6 max. upload) dialup those numbers would be achievable. Cool! This still could be a true story!
Again...I really hope it's a true story. It's nice to believe that someone somewhere is using vigilante justice tactics against spammers.
The biggest things I see going for the story are:
1. The provided details! (icq logs, pictures, etc.)
2. The premier.cluelessfucks.com mirror was taken down under threats of lawsuits.
The things against this story being true are mentioned in a zillion other posts, most of which seem to center around the lack of actual hacking details.:(
If it _is_ true, I wonder if this spam queen is on the phone right now selling the story about how she was victimized by a hacker who tried to destroy her livlihood (and cruelly put pictures of her humungous aerolas all over the internet) to Lifetime...
But here's a potential loophole (unless I'm totally wrong in my figures, which I could be...someone please recheck):
The screenshot says she was sending 3,522 e-mails per hour. That's just under 58 e-mails per second. She was supposedly using a throwaway AOL dial-up account. (The frac T1, it was said, was not used for sending spams.) Even if the laptop had dual-channel ISDN, the maximum she could spew just under 16 kilobytes per second. This would mean the size of the e-mail would have to be 282 bytes. That's enough for maybe just over four lines of text. The examples provided on the site had multiple paragraphs of text and bulleted-item lists in the spam-mails.
It doesn't add up. She **might** get 58 spams per second if #1) there was no bandwidth wasted to pesky things like TCP/IP headers and SMTP commands, #2) there were no rejected spams, #3) she had a dual-channel ISDN connection with compression for her AOL dial-up, and #4) the spam-mails were very small.
I really find it hard to believe that AOL offers dual-channel ISDN with compression and that Rodona coincidentally has an ISDN adapter for her laptop and the spams she happened to be sending when the screenshot was taken were uncharacteristically small.
But I absolutely **love** the story. Should've been a book. I really, really hope that it's true!
IIRC, he altered the routing tables so traffic destined for the root servers would go to his box instead. Do a search on "alternic" at www.news.com for details.
It looks like what he is saying is that it is the job of the courts and their army of court officers and police to compel someone to relinquish unlawful ownership of a domain.
So, for example, if you registered metallica.god and the band Metallica took you to court and you lost, it is between you and the courts and Metallica to transfer the domain...not up to the registrar.
He has a point. NSI/ICANN are way too wimpy to challenge whether the court can compel them to take an action. They just mindlessly go along with it. In doing so, they have granted the judicial system the power to reach into the DNS database and make changes.
IANAL, but here in the US, he'd probably be held in contempt of court for refusal to obey the wishes of the court...but he could start an action against the court to get it settled what powers the court has over him.
There are many things that would come into play. For example, the telephone company is not doing anything illegal by providing dial tone to someone who is committing wire fraud. So would this guy be doing anything illegal by providing DNS lookups for someone who has been found to be committing copyright/trademark infringment and thus not be subject to the will of the court? There is an instance that I can think of, however, where a 3rd party can be compelled by the court to take an action. An employer must garnishee an employee's wages when told to do so. So it could go either way. The court may be able to force him to transfer ownership of a domain...or it may not. In the US, citizens supposedly hold all rights that they have not already given away. That's the theory, anyway.
>Oh, and need I say MS SQL sucks? Don't get me started on how buggy that thing is
Good point. I don't think I've ever seen a "failed to connect to MySql" or a "failed to connect to PostgreSQL" or a "failed to connect to Oracle" message on a website. Oh, I'm sure there've been some out there...but I've never seen it. I have, however, seen THREE (3) completely separate sites claiming:
[Micorsoft Error #92878282222222][MS SQL SERVER] [Imagine this screen is blue with white writing] Connection failed.
I don't have screenshots so I don't remember exactly the wording...but that's pretty close:)
First time was when ABC was doing a web poll. Some magazine-style news show was airing and they wanted folks to go to their site and vote whether you thought this person was guilty of murdering her kid or not (or something like that).
Second time was when I went to a site to order something for my computer. Searched pricewatch, went to vendor site, couldn't place order.
Third time was at the Michigan State Lottery website.
You appear to have mistaken my comments for a deraugatory remark against the Church.
Please allow me to explain that I was merely trying to say that the Church will make an informed business decision about the things it will or will not buy based upon what it wants to do and the information available to it. Although some individual parishes (and whatnot) would appear to have no money, there are indeed funds that can be made available by the larger organization if the situation should call for it, the membership of the church, and the local community.
Any local church wishing to broadcast their message outside of the confines of the brick and mortar place of worship can appeal to several sources for $3,000. If they did deem it necessary or desirable to purchase a platform for streaming sermons into cyberspace, and they find that it would cost $3,000 for a piece of hardware and some software to do it, they'll find the money.
That's all...I certainly didn't intend to offend you or anyone else.
I have to chime in here and agree that it is quite amazing.
I mean, this 75 year old guy who thought it'd be great to use just a measly four digit number (the PIN number) to protect my bank account comes up and says he's got impenetrable encryption software? And they buy into it?!?!
Heck, my name being Doug, I had to make sure my PIN is not 3684 (or 3604), etc, lest someone getting access to my finance information by spelling my name on a phone-dial pad. Other things you have to make sure your PIN is not are the 2-digit month and 2-digit day of your birth, the 4 digit year of your birth, the year you graduated (or will graduate) from HS, etc. It's no good to have all four digits be the same, etc. Guidelines, guidelines, guidelines. All this stuff whittles down from the 10,000 PINs I can choose from.
I personally HATE the fact that my liquid assets are protected by a lousy 4-digit number. This is the guy I'm gonna trust with the security of my Fortune x00 company (well, if I had one, that is )?
For example, I choose my Linux passwords carefully enough so I know a dictionary attack or a couple days of brute-force wouldn't figure them out. But you can (if you go through my garbage or somehow obtain my bank account numbers) figure out my PIN in less than 10,000 attempts.
It seems to me that this VC was either starstruck or just plain stupid.
He should look at investing in Telecommunications Products, Inc. next! They have no product, two 71-year-old employees (Mr. & Mrs. Ranninger) and they're supposedly pushing Infrared data communications up to 6 km at OC3 speeds. Ha ha ha ha ha! Check it out at http://biz.yahoo.com/p/t/tlcre.ob.html (for a good laugh, anyway...). (HINT: this, err, "company" is obviously some kind of tax haven, so don't run out and invest in it until you do your own due dilligence.)
I was going to contest the claim, too. But I'm still researching.
For example, I remember way back in those days (I was in high school...gee, I'm old) Freenets were popping up all over the place. I remember the Cleveland Freenet was the first of these, but a quick search shows that it began in 1986.
Prior to that, yes, Usenet existed, but I don't remember it being public access. You had to be a university student at a university that had access or perhaps work at a company, research lab, or government office that had access.
But there was a public-access unix account that could be had on a system at a university in Colorado around that time...I really want to remember its name so I can look for some history on it. They would let you use their compilers and access Usenet (only if you snail mailed them a signed disclaimer and a photocopy of your driver's license/state id card). If anyone can remember that system, please post about it!
But I find myself wondering how many folks just toss free CDs that are included with products because of the AOL CD-with-everything phenomenon. Some kind of promotional CD comes with almost everything nowadays.
What will differentiate this CD from the junk CDs (like AOL) that permeate the industry?
These "reports" are done by the kind of folks who won't lend you any money without an articulately written, "fact"-laden (invented "fact" or not), future-predicting business plan.
I cannot tell you how sick I am of trying answering the questions with a straight face:
Where will your company be in 1 year? 3 years? 5 years?
For example, I'd like to have seen Netscape's "Business Plan."
1 year: Dominator of the huge upcoming Web Browser market. Oh, by the way, the WWW is going to be the biggest, most widely used used part of the internet along with e-mail. Really.
3 years: Defunct. Bought out by America Online for oodles of $$$. We all will be on yachts and starting "Remember Netscape?" websites (remember that the WWW will be the biggest, most widely used...you know...).
5 years: Not Applicable.
For some reason I don't think their business plan looked anything like that.
(Microsoft's crystal ball was working, though...their plan was something like: 1 year--dominate the market; 3 years--dominate more markets; 5 years--dominate even more markets; 10 years--dominate more markets; 15 years--dominate any markets missed in earlier years.)
But I don't place any faith in these kinds of things because if the people at the companies that these predictions are made about don't even know what the next year will bring, how would an outsider?
And that goes double for a phenomenon like Linux that's not even tethered to a single company.
Some posts are implying that after having paid for passport.com, that Chaney owned it.
I don't see how that is true.
Just paying for it doesn't change or give you the authority to change any of the contact or DNS information.
What I wonder is what the passport.com internic records looked like before Dec 27. That is, was the Billing Contact Carolyn Gudmundson...or was it someone else who may no longer work at MS?
I wonder if the USPTO "discovered" the prior art shortly after receiving a huge bill from a "Mr. Bruce Dickens, patentholder, Chief Extortioning Officer of Dickens2000."
Being almost a die-hard command-prompt (bash, et. al.) user, though, I can think of many other people that also deserve such awards. I wonder if we can get ZD (almost certainly MSNBC wouldn't cover the Tux Awards!) to do a 3 hour awards show that runs at least 45 minutes over?
Next time I run X, I guess I'll take a peek at Gnome to see what the fuss is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think that $1000 is a poor choice for a legal remedy should anyone unjustifiably adversely affect my credit score. I would much rather have the court compel the defendant to remove the offensive negative marks on my credit report. It seems a more fitting remedy, and it's worth more to me in the long run.
I also cannot imagine what kind of criminal offense it would be to auto-renew a subscription. All of this reeks of future civil actions, and hopefully class actions, but is it illegal? I'm unsure. Good thing I'm a sysadmin and not a prosecutor. How is what Wired is doing illegal?
Also, if that hair salon has music-on-hold installed on their phone system, they are supposed to pay for that as well.
I cannot even begin to tell you all how many countless hours I spent reading f2k. I'd often laugh so hard that my eyes would start tearing up and my sides would ache.
I remember seeing a network TV magazine show (20/20 or Hard Copy or whatever those interchangeable network TV magazine shows are) about a guy who was told by his doctor to stop watching Seinfeld because this guy would laugh so hard it was messing him up. Hmmmm, I think I may have chuckled at Seinfeld a couple of times. I think I found f2k as hilarious as this guy must've found Seinfeld.
The ultimate for me was definately "What is a Finite State Machine?" It's in the hall of fame...it should be required reading for every programmer.
All good things...
Oh yeah...that's true. If that spamware she was using would sort out the victim list by mail exchanger and address as few as five to ten victim's e-mail boxes per envelope, those numbers would be achievable. Even on a 56k (33.6 max. upload) dialup those numbers would be achievable. Cool! This still could be a true story!
:(
Again...I really hope it's a true story. It's nice to believe that someone somewhere is using vigilante justice tactics against spammers.
The biggest things I see going for the story are:
1. The provided details! (icq logs, pictures, etc.)
2. The premier.cluelessfucks.com mirror was taken down under threats of lawsuits.
The things against this story being true are mentioned in a zillion other posts, most of which seem to center around the lack of actual hacking details.
If it _is_ true, I wonder if this spam queen is on the phone right now selling the story about how she was victimized by a hacker who tried to destroy her livlihood (and cruelly put pictures of her humungous aerolas all over the internet) to Lifetime...
It is a really good story, though!
But here's a potential loophole (unless I'm totally wrong in my figures, which I could be...someone please recheck):
The screenshot says she was sending 3,522 e-mails per hour. That's just under 58 e-mails per second. She was supposedly using a throwaway AOL dial-up account. (The frac T1, it was said, was not used for sending spams.) Even if the laptop had dual-channel ISDN, the maximum she could spew just under 16 kilobytes per second. This would mean the size of the e-mail would have to be 282 bytes. That's enough for maybe just over four lines of text. The examples provided on the site had multiple paragraphs of text and bulleted-item lists in the spam-mails.
It doesn't add up. She **might** get 58 spams per second if #1) there was no bandwidth wasted to pesky things like TCP/IP headers and SMTP commands, #2) there were no rejected spams, #3) she had a dual-channel ISDN connection with compression for her AOL dial-up, and #4) the spam-mails were very small.
I really find it hard to believe that AOL offers dual-channel ISDN with compression and that Rodona coincidentally has an ISDN adapter for her laptop and the spams she happened to be sending when the screenshot was taken were uncharacteristically small.
But I absolutely **love** the story. Should've been a book. I really, really hope that it's true!
IIRC, he altered the routing tables so traffic destined for the root servers would go to his box instead. Do a search on "alternic" at www.news.com for details.
It looks like what he is saying is that it is the job of the courts and their army of court officers and police to compel someone to relinquish unlawful ownership of a domain.
So, for example, if you registered metallica.god and the band Metallica took you to court and you lost, it is between you and the courts and Metallica to transfer the domain...not up to the registrar.
He has a point. NSI/ICANN are way too wimpy to challenge whether the court can compel them to take an action. They just mindlessly go along with it. In doing so, they have granted the judicial system the power to reach into the DNS database and make changes.
IANAL, but here in the US, he'd probably be held in contempt of court for refusal to obey the wishes of the court...but he could start an action against the court to get it settled what powers the court has over him.
There are many things that would come into play. For example, the telephone company is not doing anything illegal by providing dial tone to someone who is committing wire fraud. So would this guy be doing anything illegal by providing DNS lookups for someone who has been found to be committing copyright/trademark infringment and thus not be subject to the will of the court? There is an instance that I can think of, however, where a 3rd party can be compelled by the court to take an action. An employer must garnishee an employee's wages when told to do so. So it could go either way. The court may be able to force him to transfer ownership of a domain...or it may not. In the US, citizens supposedly hold all rights that they have not already given away. That's the theory, anyway.
>Oh, and need I say MS SQL sucks? Don't get me started on how buggy that thing is
:)
Good point. I don't think I've ever seen a "failed to connect to MySql" or a "failed to connect to PostgreSQL" or a "failed to connect to Oracle" message on a website. Oh, I'm sure there've been some out there...but I've never seen it. I have, however, seen THREE (3) completely separate sites claiming:
[Micorsoft Error #92878282222222][MS SQL SERVER]
[Imagine this screen is blue with white writing]
Connection failed.
I don't have screenshots so I don't remember exactly the wording...but that's pretty close
First time was when ABC was doing a web poll. Some magazine-style news show was airing and they wanted folks to go to their site and vote whether you thought this person was guilty of murdering her kid or not (or something like that).
Second time was when I went to a site to order something for my computer. Searched pricewatch, went to vendor site, couldn't place order.
Third time was at the Michigan State Lottery website.
You appear to have mistaken my comments for a deraugatory remark against the Church.
Please allow me to explain that I was merely trying to say that the Church will make an informed business decision about the things it will or will not buy based upon what it wants to do and the information available to it. Although some individual parishes (and whatnot) would appear to have no money, there are indeed funds that can be made available by the larger organization if the situation should call for it, the membership of the church, and the local community.
Any local church wishing to broadcast their message outside of the confines of the brick and mortar place of worship can appeal to several sources for $3,000. If they did deem it necessary or desirable to purchase a platform for streaming sermons into cyberspace, and they find that it would cost $3,000 for a piece of hardware and some software to do it, they'll find the money.
That's all...I certainly didn't intend to offend you or anyone else.
I have to chime in here and agree that it is quite amazing.
I mean, this 75 year old guy who thought it'd be great to use just a measly four digit number (the PIN number) to protect my bank account comes up and says he's got impenetrable encryption software? And they buy into it?!?!
Heck, my name being Doug, I had to make sure my PIN is not 3684 (or 3604), etc, lest someone getting access to my finance information by spelling my name on a phone-dial pad. Other things you have to make sure your PIN is not are the 2-digit month and 2-digit day of your birth, the 4 digit year of your birth, the year you graduated (or will graduate) from HS, etc. It's no good to have all four digits be the same, etc. Guidelines, guidelines, guidelines. All this stuff whittles down from the 10,000 PINs I can choose from.
I personally HATE the fact that my liquid assets are protected by a lousy 4-digit number. This is the guy I'm gonna trust with the security of my Fortune x00 company (well, if I had one, that is )?
For example, I choose my Linux passwords carefully enough so I know a dictionary attack or a couple days of brute-force wouldn't figure them out. But you can (if you go through my garbage or somehow obtain my bank account numbers) figure out my PIN in less than 10,000 attempts.
It seems to me that this VC was either starstruck or just plain stupid.
He should look at investing in Telecommunications Products, Inc. next! They have no product, two 71-year-old employees (Mr. & Mrs. Ranninger) and they're supposedly pushing Infrared data communications up to 6 km at OC3 speeds. Ha ha ha ha ha! Check it out at http://biz.yahoo.com/p/t/tlcre.ob.html (for a good laugh, anyway...). (HINT: this, err, "company" is obviously some kind of tax haven, so don't run out and invest in it until you do your own due dilligence.)
I was going to contest the claim, too. But I'm still researching.
For example, I remember way back in those days (I was in high school...gee, I'm old) Freenets were popping up all over the place. I remember the Cleveland Freenet was the first of these, but a quick search shows that it began in 1986.
Prior to that, yes, Usenet existed, but I don't remember it being public access. You had to be a university student at a university that had access or perhaps work at a company, research lab, or government office that had access.
But there was a public-access unix account that could be had on a system at a university in Colorado around that time...I really want to remember its name so I can look for some history on it. They would let you use their compilers and access Usenet (only if you snail mailed them a signed disclaimer and a photocopy of your driver's license/state id card). If anyone can remember that system, please post about it!
My first reaction was that this is great news.
But I find myself wondering how many folks just toss free CDs that are included with products because of the AOL CD-with-everything phenomenon. Some kind of promotional CD comes with almost everything nowadays.
What will differentiate this CD from the junk CDs (like AOL) that permeate the industry?
These "reports" are done by the kind of folks who won't lend you any money without an articulately written, "fact"-laden (invented "fact" or not), future-predicting business plan.
I cannot tell you how sick I am of trying answering the questions with a straight face:
Where will your company be in 1 year? 3 years? 5 years?
For example, I'd like to have seen Netscape's "Business Plan."
1 year: Dominator of the huge upcoming Web Browser market. Oh, by the way, the WWW is going to be the biggest, most widely used used part of the internet along with e-mail. Really.
3 years: Defunct. Bought out by America Online for oodles of $$$. We all will be on yachts and starting "Remember Netscape?" websites (remember that the WWW will be the biggest, most widely used...you know...).
5 years: Not Applicable.
For some reason I don't think their business plan looked anything like that.
(Microsoft's crystal ball was working, though...their plan was something like: 1 year--dominate the market; 3 years--dominate more markets; 5 years--dominate even more markets; 10 years--dominate more markets; 15 years--dominate any markets missed in earlier years.)
But I don't place any faith in these kinds of things because if the people at the companies that these predictions are made about don't even know what the next year will bring, how would an outsider?
And that goes double for a phenomenon like Linux that's not even tethered to a single company.
Some posts are implying that after having paid for passport.com, that Chaney owned it.
I don't see how that is true.
Just paying for it doesn't change or give you the authority to change any of the contact or DNS information.
What I wonder is what the passport.com internic records looked like before Dec 27. That is, was the Billing Contact Carolyn Gudmundson...or was it someone else who may no longer work at MS?
I wonder if the USPTO "discovered" the prior art shortly after receiving a huge bill from a "Mr. Bruce Dickens, patentholder, Chief Extortioning Officer of Dickens2000."
Congratulations to Miguel de Icaza!
Being almost a die-hard command-prompt (bash, et. al.) user, though, I can think of many other people that also deserve such awards. I wonder if we can get ZD (almost certainly MSNBC wouldn't cover the Tux Awards!) to do a 3 hour awards show that runs at least 45 minutes over?
Next time I run X, I guess I'll take a peek at Gnome to see what the fuss is all about.